Handcuffs And Houdini

By JAMES BARRON

Published: October 31, 2010

DAVID BLAINE, who has shivered inside ice blocks in Times Square and floated in a water-filled sphere on Oprah Winfrey's talk show, put the handcuffs on my wrists, talking about Harry Houdini the whole time.

''For him,'' he said as we stood inside the Jewish Museum, at 1109 Fifth Avenue (92nd Street), where an exhibition on Houdini opened on Friday, ''sometimes the difficult thing was keeping the handcuffs on.''

That, clearly, was not going to be my problem.

Not to worry, Mr. Blaine said. He would teach me how to get out of them.

''I do this with cops all the time,'' Mr. Blaine said. ''They get annoyed I open up their cuffs like you open up a door.''

This was after I had tagged along as the curators gave him a preview of the Houdini exhibition. He seemed captivated by the jerky black-and-white movie clip, projected a few steps from the entrance to the exhibit, showing Houdini wriggling out of a straitjacket. He was hanging upside down over a crowd, as he so often was.

''I don't know anybody who does anything like this today,'' Mr. Blaine said with what sounded like unbridled admiration.

I asked what he saw that someone who does not do Houdini-like tricks would not know to look for.

''If he was sitting on a floor doing it,'' he said, ''he could take all the time he wanted. But when you're hanging upside down, the blood rushes to your head. So he's doing it in a fast, ambitious way. He's really a performance artist, is what he is.''

Mr. Blaine looked at all the Houdini paraphernalia: the needles he swallowed and the thread he used to pull them out; the metal milk can that he squeezed himself into and out of; the ''water-torture cell'' that he somehow survived.

Along the way, Mr. Blaine heard how Houdini's wife became a ''vanishing act,'' in the words of the exhibition curator, not through some sleight of hand but on orders from a vaudeville theater owner who signed Houdini and relegated his wife to a backstage role. ''I bet you Houdini would love this if he saw it,'' Mr. Blaine said, standing before a poster advertising Houdini. Later, Mr. Blaine watched a video of himself and looked at posters promoting magicians who tried to sound Houdiniesque: ''Weird, Marvelous Torrini,'' ''Excello -- the Great Escape Artist'' and ''the Amazing Randi -- the Man No Jail Can Hold.''

I wanted to be the man no handcuffs could hold. Mr. Blaine cuffed me after he had performed a couple of card tricks. One involved handing me a fine-point marker, telling me to pick a card and sign it, putting it back in the deck, shuffling the deck and pulling out the very card I had signed. It was the ace of clubs, in case you were wondering.

Then came the teaching moment. He showed me how to break out of the cuffs. Am I going to explain the secret? Does a reporter reveal his sources?

All I am going to say is, there was a small tool involved that he let me keep. And no, it was not a key.

PHOTOS: ESCAPE ARTIST: David Blaine demonstrates how to escape from a pair of cuffs at a Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANIEL BARRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)